Many companies still want to wait until they feel that Bluetooth and other wireless technologies have transitioned to a satisfactory “proven” stage before deploying, says a new report from In-Stat/MDR (a sister company to Electronics News).
“All indications point to deployments that will be incremental in nature,” says Joyce Putscher, a research director with In-Stat/MDR. “That is to say, mostly tens to hundreds per installation.”
According to Putscher, most applications being considered initially are cable replacement uses, such as accessing machine health, reconfiguring equipment, sensor data, patient information, patient monitoring, security access and asset tracking.
“The opportunities for replacing existing cable/wired systems, whether wired or proprietary wireless systems, will be somewhat limited in the long run, but will be faster to realize in the short term,” says Putscher. “The opportunities for adding new capabilities via wireless will be slower, but present greater prospects in the long run.”
Vertical markets such as healthcare, government, manufacturing, mining and retail will offer a myriad of opportunities for the deployment of Bluetooth, claims the report. The market research firm reports that these vertical markets will grow aggressively to over 2 million deployed Bluetooth nodes worldwide in 2007, and although there is activity in a great variety of applications and vertical markets, healthcare and manufacturing present the greatest opportunities in the near term.